library sales
i have a weakness for library book sales. dusty and crowded as they are, they allow me to buy a literal grocery bag-full of books for about ten bucks. i can pick up paperbacks three for a dollar – i can pick up trashy paperbacks and consider them disposable. of course, i never throw out books, but still, i can have that mentality if i so please.
about three weeks ago i got a bug in my ear (isn’t that the grossest expression? at this time it’s purely an expression, but i have indeed had a bug in my ear before and i cried and cried while cam tried to get it out) that i needed a mini project. i decided that i wanted to work with my bookcases, so i investigated ways to fancy them up quickly and cheaply. (our library room – known informally as the book nook, to distinguish it from the nook, which is attached to the kitchen – has four tall bookcases, one corner bookcase and two short bookcases with doors, all medium brown billy from ikea. there are also five cd shelf-things, also in medium brown. benno, i think they were called.) i determined that the best thing to do would be to put some color into the backings. i contemplated two options, painted foamcore and wallpaper. i read into both and couldn’t decide. then i gave up on the foamcore and settled on wallpaper because i’m too lazy to paint both sides of the foamcore (to keep it from warping). i didn’t want to use wallpaper paste for this as some sites suggested, but i figured double-sided tape would work nicely.
on a friday night i forced cam to take me to lowes because i knew they had a good supply of wallpaper. we grabbed a bunch of samples – not really my style because i really just wanted to buy a roll and be done with it. then i went over to the contact paper* section. i had heard that lowes carried a metallic contact paper, so i wanted to see it. i found something that vaguely resembled metal, but more importantly i also found a pretty and subdued beige floraly-leafy paper. at less than $5 a roll, i thought it might be worth a shot.
when we got home, i immediately tucked up the wallpaper samples to the back of a shelf, along with a piece of the contact paper. i showed cam. we wiffled and wobbled and eventually decided to just go with the contact paper because it was cheap and it already had adhesive on it. low tack for easy repositioning! and without backing paper! unroll and stick. much easier than the old peel and stick that stuck and stuck and stuck. this was a duck brand paper, by the way.
by the end of the weekend i had completed two and a half of the four bookcases. (i’ll finish the other one and a half once we rearrange the furniture in there – it’s far too hard to move couches when they have nowhere else to go. no point in working on the corner bookcase (too deep), the cd shelves (too many) or the ones with doors.) i also moved all of the books on those bookcases to the front to keep me from stashing “decorative” and not-so-decorative things in front of the books. i had discovered a while ago that standard-sized paperbacks can fit two deep on a shelf, so i moved some books around. the top shelf of one perfectly holds a bunch of star trek: next generation paperbacks (and related stuff), so it isn’t too important that we can’t see the second row because we know what’s up there. the second shelf, however, was a bit trickier. the shelf pin positions meant we had to have at least a few inches visible above the tops of the books – moving the pins up one made the opening too small. plus this shelf had a variety of things. some piers anthony, some agatha christie, some orson scott card, etc. etc. etc. you’d never be able to find anything in the back row without pulling out the entire front row. a previous day’s experiment showed that a row of books was simply too heavy to be supported by tension rods. (duh. i blame martha stewart with her multiple uses for tension rods. it would have never occurred to me otherwise to try it.) what to do? eventually i came up with a low-rent solution – i cut pieces of cardboard to make little square tubes, then wrapped them with packing tape. the resulting construction was strong enough to proudly hold up a row of books.
oops. almost forgot. i was talking initially about library sales, wasn’t i? well... in the redecorating process, i moved all my cookbooks to the kitchen and consolidated some shelves, leaving me with two completely empty ones! so last weekend i bought about 30 paperbacks, mostly agatha christie and dick francis. they almost fill what should the front row of a shelf. cam says that i should start looking into the books i own to see what i could donate to the library. to that i say, “pfft.” how could i possibly start giving away books as long as i still have the shelf space to accommodate them?
*contact paper (or con-tact paper) is to self-adhesive shelf paper as kleenex is to tissue... right? whatever you call it, i am obsessed with the stuff. last large-scale usage was when i made a playhouse for paul out of a box. in the past i would have used foil and tape, but paul would have torn that to shreds and then eaten it. so i used some nice neutral contact paper and made a wipe-clean house!